By Rhonda Spivak
I have recently been to two Palestinian refugee camps run by the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency [UNWRA] near Bethlehem. My visit has unfortunately left me with the impression that Palestinians are far from giving up on the right of return to their 1948 homes and villages in Israel. I saw first-hand how Palestinian refugees in UNWRA camps live in what I can only describe as a “time warp.” These UNWRA camps perpetuate the illusion that the Palestinians will one day return to their former homes and villages in pre-67 Israel.
For example, I was rather shocked to see at the entrance to the Aida UNWRA refugee camp a huge “key” that says “Not for sale.” It promotes the notion of a “right of return” that “cannot be bought.” It begs the question of of why the West allows such a display at a UN refugee camp it funds. It only feeds the illusion of a mass “right of return” which would require the ultimate destruction of Israel.
Many years ago, in 1989 I co-founded the chapter of Peace Now in Winnipeg, because I believed that Palestinians in UNWRA refugee camps would forego the “right of return” to 1948 Israel and would live in a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, that would co-exist alongside Israel, which would have a Jewish majority. For a two-state solution ever to be feasible, Palestine would have to forego the “right of return.”
But on my recent visit I saw that in UNWRA Palestinian refugee camps people live in streets according to the villages they came from (i.e. refugees and their descendants from Jaffa all live near each other), children’s sports teams are divided according to former villages (i.e. children who are descendants of Jaffa refugees are on one team). This serves only to perpetuate the conflict by feeding the people with false and unrealistic notions of returning to a pre-67 Israel. In both UNWRA refugee camps I visited there were “NAKBA” signs that showed maps of Palestine, that included all of pre-67 Israel.
When I was in Aida refugee camp, I saw several long blocks of huge murals depicting all the Palestinian villages to which the refugees wish to return. I was struck by the fact that one of the villages in these murals, for example, depicted Be’er Sheva as a small pastoral village with several houses. Today, of course, Be’er Sheva is a developed city of 200,000 people.
When I was at a J-Street conference in Washington last month, I met a naive Jewish peace activist who spent time in UNWRA’s Deheishe Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, where she volunteered to run an art program. She told me that when the children were asked to draw something, rather than drawing a tree, or a sun, or a moon, they all drew the same thing: a large key representing the key to the home in the village where their grandparents lived in 1948 – the one to which they hoped one day to return.
“It was disturbing to realize that this was the first thing the children drew,” the art teacher told me. For there to be a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel, youth in NWRA’s Palestinian refugee camps need to be taught to focus on moving on, upgrading their lives and resettling into nice homes in Bethlehem, Ramallah and the West Bank, not in pre-67 Israel.
Having been to UNWRA’s Palestinian Refugee Camp in Deheishe, I can attest to the fact that there is a large mural of a female suicide bomber – a graduate of the school – on an UNWRA school right near the entrance to the camp. In allowing this mural to remain, the UNWRA school glorifies terror and perpetuates the continuation of the conflict. The suicide bomber becomes the person children admire and seek to aspire to become. Why the United States and other Western countries fund a UN school without requiring it to remove a huge mural of a terrorist, defies reason.
I also saw the street near the back of the school and noticed a number of other large murals of terrorists (martyrs) who have died for the cause of liberating all of Palestine.
At the J-Street conference in Washington I met George A. Laudato who works for US AID (U.S. Agency for International Development), their Middle East Bureau. Laudato confirmed that although US AID builds schools in UNWRA Palestinian Refugee Camps, US AID “does not monitor the content” of what is taught in those schools, which he acknowledged, “is a problem.” Laudato told me of a situation that “occurred three to four years ago” at a school built by US AID he visited in Egypt.
“When I looked at one of the globes in a classroom, I realized the globe didn’t have Israel on it. All the globes in the school were the same [missing Israel]. I knew that the American Congress wouldn’t want to be paying for this,” he said.
Laudato stepped in and insisted that these globes be replaced with ones that had Israel on them, but he emphasized that normally US AID wouldn’t have intervened in something like this. “I intervened because we have had a relationship in Egypt for over 30 years, so I felt I could do something about replacing the maps, but this is not the usual case.”
Andrew Whitley, the outgoing director of UNWRA’s New York office, made headlines this past fall when he told the National Council for US-Arab Relations annual conference, October 22, 2010, that it was time to level with the refugees:
“If one doesn’t start a discussion soon with the refugees, for them to consider what their own future might be; for them to start debating their own role in the societies where they are rather than being left in a state of limbo where they are helpless, but rather preserve the cruel illusions that perhaps they will return one day to their homes, then we are storing up trouble for ourselves…. We recognize, as I think most do, although it’s not a position that we publicly articulate, that the “right of return” is unlikely to be exercised to the territory of Israel to any significant or meaningful extent…. It’s not a politically palatable issue, it’s not one that UNRWA publicly advocates, but nevertheless it’s a known contour to the issue.”
When Whitley said this, he was “roasted over the coals” by Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat and others in the PA, and several days later he retracted the statement, apologizing for it and clarifying that his remarks were “inappropriate and wrong,” and “did not represent UNRWA’s views.”
Many refugees claim that Palestinian leadership cannot give up the “right to return,” since it is not theirs to give up. They claim therefore that each refugee family can decide what they wish to do—receive a compensation package and live elsewhere, return to the West Bank/Gaza, or go back to their original villages as in 1948 Israel.
It should be noted that Lt. Col. (Res) Jonathan Dahoah Halevy pointed out that Saeb Erekat, when he was PA chief negotiator, delivered two speeches at Fatah conventions in Hebron and Jericho during 2009 in Arabic in which he said the “right of return” is the individual right of each refugee and cannot be conceded by anyone in negotiations. This is consistent with what Erekat wrote in December 2010 in the Guardian.
This is also what Palestinian Huwaida Araf, one of the key organizers of 2010’s infamous Floatilla to Gaza told me when she appeared in Winnipeg last week as a speaker for Israel Apartheid Week.
Questions that need to be answered are these:
Who in Palestinian society is coming forward to level with Palestinian refugees and their descendants to say that they aren’t going back to their villages in Israel?
Who in the PA leadership is telling the refugees in the UNWRA camps I saw near Bethlehem that it’s time for them to plan on the Bethlehem area as being their permanent residence so that they can begin redirecting their energies toward rebuilding their lives and their future?
Rhonda Spivak, B.A., L.L.B., also called to the Isralei Bar. She is the editor of Winnipeg Jewish Review.
Originally published on the website, Winnipeg Jewish Review, March 2011.
Used with permission. Copyright © 2011 Acts News Network.